Monday, August 26, 2013

2013 read #111: The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks.

The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks
263 pages
Published 1996
Read August 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise brought this book to my attention, mentioning the achromatopsic islanders of Pingelap in passing as representative of a whole other type of society, a scotopic existence flourishing in the to us "unreliable" light of dawn, dusk, and moon. Meloy exaggerated a bit, if I remember correctly -- I certainly came away from Turquoise with the impression that "entire villages" functioned in the half light of crepuscular times. Right from the start, Sacks establishes that no more than 10-15% of the islanders are achromatopsic, still a remarkable population, but nothing like the "Wellsian" fantasy implicit in the title, a fantasy Sacks freely (and winsomely) confesses to harboring before his journey to Pingelap.

But I don't need a fully colorblind society to enjoy this book. This sounds seriously awkward and weird, but between this book and Sacks' Oaxaca Journal, I feel as if I would really enjoy being this guy's friend. His scarcely buried desire to be a Victorian polymath and naturalist, his lack of natural social graces, his charmingly frank admission of romantic notions nurtured by Wells and Conan Doyle, his love of ancient plants and his "profound sense of being at home" in cycad forests and other glimpses of deep time -- I think he and I would get along, in some possibly creepy fanboy dimension. I've never felt that about an author before. While you may rest assured I won't be hiding in the ferns outside his house any time soon, I do feel that reading his books -- especially the more rambly books where he mingles ancient botany with all the neuroscience -- is a terrific treat.

Incidentally, I hate books with endnotes I actually have to read. I love all the extra information, but I hate having to flip between two parts of a book and maintaining two bookmarks as I go. This is exactly the reason footnotes were invented.

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